The Challenge of Tier 2 Instruction
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Hi, and welcome back to the smarter literacy podcast from ascend smarter intervention, where we simplify effective literacy instructions so you can focus more on your students.
I'm Lindsey.
And I'm Corey, and today we're focusing on something that so many interventionists wrestle with.
How do you build a strong science of reading a line literacy plan when you've only got a few minutes a day or a few weeks total with your students? Whether you're delivering tier two instruction in a push in or pull out model, or you're managing intervention blocks that feel too short for the skills you need to cover, we've been there.
And we know how overwhelming it can be when your instruction time doesn't match the size of your students' needs.
That's why today we're showing you how to build a simple roadmap, a scope and sequence that helps you make the most of the time you do have.
And let's admit it.
Scope and Sequence Explained
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Tier two can feel like the most chaotic tier.
You've got kids pulled from different classrooms, different grades, different skill levels.
You might have them for twenty minutes, three times a week, or forty minutes for only six weeks.
And when you don't have a clear plan, you end up grabbing random activities that seem good But they don't build from one to the next.
It's kinda like cooking without a recipe and hoping it all turns out okay.
Tier two instruction doesn't need to be long to be effective, but it does need to be systematic, targeted, consistent.
And the best way to do that is by building a clear scope and sequence that fits your time and your setting.
If that feels intimidating, don't worry.
It's actually really simple.
Planning a Tier 2 Roadmap
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Let's start with the basics.
What is a scope and sequence? Yeah.
That is a great question.
So a scope is what you're teaching.
So it's the specific skills that you want to include in your instruction.
That could be specific decoding skills, specific fluency skills, comprehension strategies, And the sequence is the order that you teach it in.
You can't just jump straight to paragraphs, for example, before you've taught sentences.
So the scope, again, is what you're teaching and the sequence is the order you're teaching it in.
Kind of like the scope is your grocery list and the sequence is your recipe steps.
Without both, it's really hard to feel confident in your instruction or get consistent results.
Absolutely.
So we wanna jump into how do you actually build one that works in a tier two setting?
Real-World Example: Secondary Setting
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So the first thing that you wanna start with is your time frame.
How long do you have with your students? Are you working with them for six weeks? Do you have them for twelve weeks? Is this a year long group? What does that look like? How long are you working in that tier two intervention setting before you're going to mix things up again? Then you wanna consider your schedule.
So once you have established the time frame, how long you're gonna be working with your students, the second thing is your schedule.
Are you gonna be working with these students for fifteen minutes a day? Forty five minutes once a week? What does that look like within that time frame? How much time is scheduled with your students.
And then the third thing that you wanna consider is your group needs.
So are you gonna be targeting word recognition instructions, so maybe really focusing on phonological awareness and phonics, Are you going to be focusing on fluency skills? Are you gonna work on language comprehension? Are thinking more about vocabulary and comprehension skills? You really wanna think about, again, what is it that this group needs? Absolutely.
And from there, you can break your plan into a few big buckets, the phonemic awareness, like you talked about, decoding, etcetera, and small targets from each week or session.
Exactly.
So that's how you're really determining how many groups do you have again, what are you working on? So some of those buckets might be this is my word recognition group.
This is my language comprehension group.
This is my fluency group.
This is my writing group.
Those can be the types of things that you're thinking about within those buckets.
So, for example, if you were putting together a six week decoding or word recognition group, your sequence might look something like in week one.
I'm gonna be focusing on closed syllables.
In week two, I'm gonna work on vowel consonant e.
In week three, I'm gonna focus on r controlled.
In week four, I'm going to be working on open syllables, week five, vowel teams, And then as I get into week six, thinking more about, you know, multisyllabic or stable final syllables with affixes and things like that.
And so again, I knew that this particular group needed to work on word recognition or decoding skills, and I also knew that I only had them for six weeks So those were gonna be the specific skills that I was going to target for that particular group.
Right.
And again, it it doesn't have to be perfect.
It just has to be intentional.
And a messy plan is better than no plan.
Your students don't need perfection.
They need consistency.
Exactly.
Referral and Scheduling Process
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So Lindsey, I'd love to hear a little bit about how you organized this in your setting and the secondary setting previously.
So, yeah, our setting was actually pretty interesting.
So, of course, I was a secondary literacy specialist, and our tier one was the content classrooms.
Then from there, we we had, um, identified students generally through our our screening tests that needed more assistance, and that's where they were entered into a tier two setting, which is what we called AIS.
They were basically given a time that in their worked in their schedules as, uh, happens in a lot of secondary schools, and they would be working in small groups.
The AS teachers, we had three of them, worked together to really identify the needs of the students.
And to really, yeah, focus on, okay, our goal is to try to get these students back into the tier one setting, but we know that they need more help.
And sometimes they were helping more in the phonics and the phonemic awareness.
And sometimes the groups looked more like the vocab and comprehension, the language comprehension pieces.
So they really tried to formulate plans to figure out, okay, how do we meet our students' needs? What do we need to hit? And how do we make our own scope and sequence? Almost every single time they got new groups, they had to look at what do we need to really hit? So it wasn't necessarily starting over a reasonable time, but they really had to pay attention to This is my goal.
This is the time frame that I'm looking at.
Generally is around six weeks.
The idea was around six weeks.
We were gonna try getting the students back into just a tier one setting.
And then if they needed more, they would go in for another six weeks, having, like, twelve weeks and see how that worked.
And then sometimes the kids were in there for the full year if they needed it.
And sometimes if that happened, the kids then would be sent to a tier three setting if they needed even more support.
So But it really helped to have that scope and sequence, that roadmap to figure out how do we get from point a to point b and what is our goal, and it really came down to a time frame, mostly, and really fitting in, like, how do we reach these skills in that time frame? Okay, Lindsey.
So I have a few questions for you.
First, what does AIS stand for? Absolutely.
It stands for academic intervention services.
Okay.
That makes perfect sense.
What a nice name for your tier two students.
I love that.
Okay.
So next question.
I know that you mentioned that students are referred based on data.
What does that look like?
Using Fast Five Lessons
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So what happens is in the tier one classroom, usually the ELA classroom, there is a universal screener.
And the universal screener will give us the data that we need to be able to kind of notice, oh, we've got some red flags here.
These kids might need some more help.
And, um, so then we we generally go off the data from the universal screener, or we get the referral from the classroom teacher.
Again, usually in the LA Teacher because they are noticing that a student is struggling in their classroom.
So they go to the AIS teacher and make a referral themselves.
Okay.
I love that.
And then another question, when does this intervention happen? Is this pullout? Is this pushing? What does that look like? Where does that happen in the day? So, yes, this is pullout for our students.
And in their schedules, they would actually be given a new schedule.
So instead of, like, a study hall, they would have a class that would say AIS, reading, or literacy, and they would have a forty two minute block built into their day where they go and actually meet with their AS teacher in a classroom.
So the AS teacher doesn't have to grab them from any class or anything.
It's just already built into the student's schedule.
Okay.
That makes sense.
So are they reworking the schedule? If after six weeks, it's determined that they don't need it anymore or does that look like? Yes.
So, again, the guidance counselors are always really good about that, where they always choose a time that the student had kind of open, whether it was a special that could kind of be moved around a little bit easily, but mostly they tried to just pull a study hall.
So after six weeks, if the student was ready to be discharged from the tier two ai services, they would just get that study hall back or again, their schedule could be rearranged if if needed to be for those specials.
Oh, that's perfect.
No.
That makes perfect sense.
When Tier 2 Isn’t Enough
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And I know too that we've even been talking about this a little bit, and I think this is a place where we have lessons that we use that we call Fast Five and Fast Five lessons are designed around thematic units where it might be something around volcanoes or something around a cultural event or a historical event, and it can be really helpful to utilize some of those types of things to help to build out some of that tier two instruction because what it allows you to do is it allows you an opportunity to work through phonemic awareness or phonological awareness or vocabulary or comprehension.
It's just allowing you to do that in a way that sort of fits into the time frame that you have because I think like you said, the most important thing is thinking about how long do I have with these students, because what I don't wanna do is I don't wanna get into this long scope and sequence where it's like I have all of these skills to teach, but it would honestly take me a minimum of a year Right.
To be teaching these skills when you know I may only have these students for this really small targeted time frame.
Absolutely.
And what you were saying with the the Fast Five units, that's exactly what my coworkers in the tier two setting were doing, were hitting those skills in a faster way, right, and being able to get their students skills improved kind of in a quicker format than in a tier three setting.
Absolutely.
Closing Thoughts and Next Steps
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Because ultimately what you start to realize if students still are not making progress, they're not making growth when they're working through something like that, then that's sort of that flag of, hey, we actually need more support than this.
And if we do need more support than this, then this is when we need to start making those referrals to tier three or, yeah, can these families be getting private support? Is that something that's on the table? And I know that isn't always on the table, but if it is, that's where you might wanna make those recommendations too of, hey, over the summer.
You might wanna look at some summer supports and things like that.
Absolutely.
Perfect.
So that being said, this month, in our five CCL learning lab, we're gonna be talking all about how to make literacy work across those different tiers.
So if you wanna learn a little bit more about what that might look like, we would love to have you in there.
So if you're interested in learning more about that, definitely jump in.
You can learn more at smarterintervention.com/learninglab.
Awesome.
And, again, to keep this actionable, if you are in tier two, here's your next step.
Map out how long you have with your students.
Identify the core skills you wanna target and build a simple scope and sequence that focuses on growth over perfection.
Try to get them back to that tier one setting.
That's kind of the goal, remember, in tier two.
Absolutely.
And so, again, we're thinking about what this looks like, not just in tier two, but what it looks like from tier one to tier two, to tier three, And again, we've worked with so many educators who feel overwhelmed at first.
But once you do have that flexible roadmap, sessions start to become so much easier to plan, so much more effective.
And so, again, if you are just looking for some ready to use templates, definitely join us for our spotlight PD session, making literacy work across the tiers of instruction.
Thank you so much for listening today.
You're doing incredibly important work, and we're honored to walk alongside you.
So next time we're gonna be diving into tier three and what it really takes to deliver intensive literacy intervention and why systems matter more than ever at that tier.
We'll see you then.
And until next time, keep showing up, keep simplifying, and keep making a difference.
Podcast Outro
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